Social Intelligence

The New Science of Human Relationships

Daniel Goleman

Social Intelligence
"Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships" is a non-fiction book written by psychologist and journalist Daniel Goleman. This book is meant to be a companion piece to his earlier book "Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ". Goleman states that in 1995, when Emotional Intelligence was published, brain research had not reached the levels of understanding it does now (2006). Also, while emotional intelligence deals mainly with the personal, social intelligence deals with the interpersonal. The book examines the relationship between neuroscience and human interactions.

Daniel Golemans fundamental premise is that good relationships support our physical
and mental health and help us to improve ourselves in a positive fashion, while negative relationships do just the opposite. Our social network has a lot to do with how we think and how we behave on our own.

Defining Social Intelligence

Goleman defines Social Intelligence as being knowledgeable about both our interpersonal relationships and in how we act in them as well it combines social awareness and social facility. Social awareness allows us to feel empathy for others, tune into the other person

through focused listening, understand the social signals more clearly, and in general a
better understanding about how the social world works. Social facility involves interacting smoothly on non-verbal levels, communicating

effectively what we intend, influencing the outcome of social situations, a concern about
others and a willingness to act on that concern.

The Essence
Goleman explains that many of our qualities as human beings such as kindness, compassion etc. have corresponding brain chemistry which mostly gets defined during early childhood. This means that emotional security given to a child may determine how his or her life may turn out eventually. A child needs to be exposed to a wide variety of emotions in a healthy dose for him or her to face the later life with emotional maturity. It explains why someone brought up in a large family is emotionally stable compared to those from smaller families. Abusing a child will invariably have disastrous results in later life.

The author uses his own research and life-experiences, as well as experiences of others
to continually make his point about the impact that our social relationships have on our lives.

Wired to Connect
The author starts with the premise that our brains hard wired to connect with other people and there are two distinct social brain areas the low road and the high road. Our emotional experiences with others occur on the low road through the amygdala in our mid-brains that receive messages from our senses without any verbal communication.

On the low road, feelings pass from person to person unconsciously without either being
fully aware of it, as though emotions were contagious. The low road works at high speed, and is responsible for our survival instinct as well as helps us to receive the so called first impressions. The low road is instinct and emotion based, and uses non-verbal cues like body language and facial expressions to provide feedback during a social interaction.

The High Road

The high road is the thinking brain which applies reason over the low road response. It revolves more around communication, adaptation, and the ability to recall past experiences. The high road provides us a conscious understanding of whats going on.

Our social lives are governed by the interplay of the high road and the low road. Any
conversation operates on two levels: the rational high road (using words and their intended meanings) and a low road that uses the emotion underlying the words to communicate our intention.

Its the company you keep

Our interactions with others influence our behavior again and again in small seemingly unnoticeable ways. One example of this is that how people behave with us alters our self-image. We often subtly mimic the behavior of others as we see them in various situations, and we also tend to replicate that behaviour ourselves. There are special neurons in brain called mirror neurons which mirrors the emotions of the person we are interacting. This means that if we associate with people who have good behavior in a wide variety of situations, this is likely to affect our own behaviour as well.

Our relationships form usfor better or worse, depending on their quality.

Do onto others.
On the subject of altruism, Goleman shows what neuroscience has to say on the topic. He asserts that by understanding ourselves and the world around us, we can improve our response to altruism more effectively. He believes the best way to do this is to focus on compassion and empathy for others, instead of being self-absorbed. This may not be easy to do he says, but with deliberate practice and concentration, it should be possible to get steadily better at this, which in turn has the potential to improve our own quality of life dramatically. Goleman narrates an incident in New York where he stopped to help a homeless person

on the subway steps, who had till then been ignored by hundreds of passers by. Very
soon others also joined him in helping the man. According to Goleman, this is an example of altruism can also be contagious.

Broken Bonds
In this section Goleman breaks down the character traits that lead us to have unhealthy relationships, and the various reasons that people have negative social interactions. The primary amongst these reasons is called the I-It interaction. This happens when one person tends to treat the other person as an object.

These types of interactions can vary from a somewhat innocuous situation of a spouse
not paying attention to his/her partner, to the extreme of a serial killer taking their victims life. What all I-It interactions have in common is a lack of empathy from one party, with the other party feeling a considerable amount of rejection.

The unholy triad

To explain more on broken bonds, Goleman looks at what psychologists refer to as the "dark triad", a group of three character traits which are detrimental to interpersonal relationships. He calls these the Narcissists, Machiavellians and Psychopaths. The characteristics that extreme narcissists depict are: they care very little how their actions affect others; they crave to be admired (rather than loved); they take credit for

successes but never blame for failures.

To Machiavellians the ends justify the means. Other people are used as steps to be climbed over, in their personal path to glory. They tend to leave their relationships behind them, whether these be family, social, or business, with perfect impunity and without any caring or emotion. Psychopaths tend to feel no anxiety or fear, are immune to stress, are indifferent to others pain, and seem to be uncaring about threat of punishment.

The uncaring types

All these conditions show a serious lack of empathy for others. This is what makes some people commit heinous crimes against others. These personality types are not burdened with the socially accepted emotions like remorse, guilt, shame, embarrassment or pride the very emotions that act as a moral compass in normal persons. When people treat us poorly, it tends to adversely impact our own self-image. When the social bonds that keep our relationships together break, they can hurt our future relationships more severely than we imagine. The key to not letting this happen is improving our understanding of other people. Other people are exactly like us - they make mistakes, they have their own goals and dreams. Its not at all a reflection on us if others do not involve us in their own goals and dreams - though we can use these situations to ascertain the need to improve some aspect of ourselves. Its about selfimprovement, not self-blame.

Genes, Environment and Relationships

In the section called Nurturing Nature, Goleman writes about the complex relationship between a persons genes (their supposedly inherited attributes), and their life environment and experiences. The author uses neuroscience to show how both play a role in the type of people we become. While honouring both sides of the debate, the author ultimately seems to believe that genes are not destiny. While nature does form some aspects of who we are, most of who we become is influenced by the people around us and the interactions and experiences we have. This means that even though we are born with specific genes, our environment can alter their behaviour. Using numerous examples, the author shows that environment, i.e. nurture, often plays a very crucial role in how certain genes evolve. It is possible that a specific genetic disease never manifests in a person simply because the triggers required to activate the gene were never present in his life.

Nature vs. Nurture

Goleman asserts that family life alters the activity of genes. How we treat children influences how their genes act out ultimately. How the family responds to a childs uniqueness can have a huge effect on the childs temperament. What children experience every day, day after day, moulds and shapes the circuits in their brains. Our social relationships even have the power to affect our appearance (the last bastion of genetic influence). As an example, a happily married couple can begin to resemble each other after several years of married life, simply because they tend to mimic each others expressions that makes their facial muscles acquire similar shapes.

Depression can be inherited in a sense from depressed parents this does not mean
though that Depression is genetic in nature. What it is caused by instead is the environment of depression the child grows up in if the primary trigger for various activities at home is that of depression .

You an call Love by any other name

Obviously, these concepts relate deeply to love and committed relationships. On the subject of how our brains react to love, the author writes about the three different neural networks that exist in human beings for attachment, caregiving and sex. While these three networks are similar in many ways, these can be somewhat different in the way these make us react in each of the three different situations.

Attachment, mentions Goleman, comes in three varieties avoidant, secure, and

anxious. Avoidant and anxious type of people have difficulty in dealing with emotions both their own and others. Those who have secure attachment, are often more healthy and can deal with their and others emotions quite easily. Relationships are the end result of a large number of social interactions, and people who are in relationships often powerfully shape each other in more ways than they realise.

Good guys live longer

Goleman has, throughout the book in various ways, advocated the principle that social intelligence is the key to a healthy and fulfilling life. The author suggests that having adequate social intelligence will not only make life more enjoyable, but it will actually help to improve physical health. Goleman refers to the rapid deterioration of emotional aspect in healthcare. For doctors, patients are no longer human beings, but rather systems to be repaired. He points out that various initiatives have been started in US to educate healthcare workers about the emotional aspect of treatment.

Goleman also looks at all the various social causes that lead to stress. Stress causes the
adrenaline glands to release the hormone cortisol, to help fight or flight during emergencies. While cortisol secretion is a necessary step for a healthy body, if there is too much of it in the system, it is ultimately detrimental to the bodys immune system.

No more worries
Goleman is of the opinion that stress is almost entirely a social phenomenon because it indicates on some level that we feel were letting others down. The healthiest relationships we have the ones that lack stress are often the strongest ones we have. Whether our important relationships are healthy or unhealthy can make a difference in the physical condition of our bodies. Bad or unhealthy relationships can be major factors for disease and death as much or more threatening than smoking, high blood pressure, cholesterol, or physical inactivity. Loneliness inhibits cardiovascular and immune functions. Employees in subordinate positions who suppress their anger are four times as likely to develop cardiovascular disease as top executives. Healthy connections (the ones that do not provide us with stress) are immensely valuable in our lives because they allow us to make deep connections and grow as human beings.

Physician, heal thyself

Goleman asserts that in large part the medical profession itself suffers from an intrinsic
lack of love. Compassion is not considered to be an integral part of medical practice. In reality, according to Goleman, caregivers who take time to express compassion are healthier and happier in their work than those who maintain a strictly clinical approach.

Unfortunately, the motive to connect with people that draws so many into the medical
profession, gets slowly eradicated by the hospital culture. The question is not whether empathy can be taught to medical caregivers, but rather what is that we are doing, as a society, to deprive them of this wonderful healing tool.

Finding the Balance

A healthy life is one that finds a happy medium between stress and boredom. In either

extreme case, were unproductive and often unhappy. The key is to find situations and
relationships where were neither bored nor stressed out. This applies in almost every situation in life, from having a dinner with acquaintances to working on a project in the workplace. Thus, if you want to succeed or want the people around you to succeed, you

need a warm and enjoyable environment. Shared positive interactions create the kind of
stress-free life that leads to success. Goleman concludes that social intelligence demands that we realise that not just our

emotions but our very biology is being driven and molded, for better or for worse, by
others and in turn, that we take responsibility for how we affect the people in our lives.